If you've got the time, Boucherie restaurant in New Orleans is the place

Ted Jackson/The Times-PicayuneBarbecue ribs make the transition to white tablecloths at Boucherie.

It was well past midnight the first time I ate Nathanial Zimet's food.

He was cooking inside a purple truck called Que Crawl parked outside Tipitina's during Jazz Fest last year. I forget who was playing in the club that night, but I remember the food well: smoky spare ribs, hot-from-the-oil grit fries and a pulled-pork sandwich that rivaled the cochon de lait po-boy I had at the Fair Grounds earlier that day.

The line outside the truck's window was long, and the wait for food after I'd placed my order wasn't brief. But some things are worthy of patience.

My inaugural dinner at Boucherie, Zimet's first restaurant without wheels, was in February. The meal brought into sharper focus the high-end restaurant training that is the secret behind Que Crawl's quality.

The long grit fries resembled grizzled grissini, the Italian bread sticks, only sumptuous: They were slenderer than the fries I had outside Tip's and served over a hearty portion of collard greens. Purple cabbage slaw sat like a wilted crown atop a crisped fist of pulled pork, less a take on the now-ubiquitous cochon de lait than a cultivated interpretation of Carolina barbecue. Thai chile provided a distinctive pulse in every bite of dark chocolate chess pie.

The meal stretched on longer than planned -- much longer, in fact -- but my dining mates and I didn't really mind. Our party had plenty to discuss, and the food easily captured our attention. The wait was worth it.

But does that make it OK?

The answer is no, and how much that knowledge ruffles your feathers depends on how closely you believe the quality of a restaurant's food should correlate to the quality of its entire operation.

Boucherie is nearly impossible to dislike -- but is also unmistakably flawed. It announces the emergence of an exciting chef still in the beginning stages of becoming a restaurateur.

Ted Jackson/The Times-PicayuneBoucherie is located inside a renovated cottage that has been home to numerous homey New Orleans restaurants.

Food: Very good to excellent. Porky, casually global and at points aggressively down-to-earth, Nathanial Zimet's food announces the emergence of an exciting new talent. He has an impressive knack for pairing flavors and ingredients in simple, subtly inventive dishes.

Ambiance: Good to very good. The many restaurants that have set up shop inside this old cottage suggest that little can be done to the space other than move in and embrace the coziness. Which is what Boucherie has done.

Service: Fair to good. The staff is friendly and accommodating, but the service is excruciatingly slow, to the point where it can overshadow the food.

There is little doubt Boucherie has struck a chord with local diners. Since mid-winter, no other restaurant has cropped up more in personal conversations -- or e-mails or texts or Tweets -- than Zimet's unassuming place in Carrollton. Each time I've visited it has been filled to capacity for at least part of the evening. There's little mystery as to why.

Boucherie gives New Orleans one more restaurant (Cochon is the other) at the center of an established culinary zeitgeist of a particularly populist bent. Its sensibility is porky, casually global and at points aggressively down-to-earth. Its chef has worked at restaurants (Zimet's resume includes stints at Commander's Palace and Stella!) that bear little resemblance to the one he opened himself. His is the kind of place where you imagine he'd like to eat when he's not behind the stove himself.

These are characteristics that apply to an array of fashionable new restaurants from Los Angeles to San Francisco to Chicago to New York. Most are run by young male chefs. None is a good place to suddenly realize your date is "sorta vegetarian."

Yet Boucherie is no clone. The make-do resourcefulness of Zimet's street cooking is evident on the menu, but it's elevated by an impressive knack for pairing flavors and ingredients in simple, subtly inventive dishes that deliver memorable rewards.

His novel use of salty collards as both the flavor center and primary sustenance of a dish reappears with a small plate of steamed mussels, which have never tasted as substantial -- and Southern -- as they do here. Early last week, ribbons of hamachi sashimi plated with hard-spiced, house-pickled vegetables cleansed our palates for Zimet's confidently eclectic cooking.

Jicama slaw and a creamy avocado-coconut sauce were surprisingly subtle background players on a halibut dish so summery it could have come from Hawaii. Baby root vegetable salad gave a small plate of crisped duck confit the heft of an entree, while miso broth and heads of baby bok choy, each flecked with grill char, made a dish of seared duck breast eat like a warm, restorative salad.

What wasn't to like? Well, the halibut would have been better if it could have siphoned off some of the confit's salt. More problematic, the first glasses of wine didn't arrive until 40 minutes after our arrival. It took 25 minutes more for our appetizers to appear and another half-hour after that for the entrees. By meal's end, the glacial pace of the service was my table's main topic of conversation.

In fact, all of my meals at Boucherie reinforced the stereotype that New Orleanians go about their business as if walking through molasses. Which is to say inefficiency does not mean an absence of charm.

Sure, it's reasonable to expect someone to have gotten around to changing the sign on the building's front -- it still reads Iris, the address's former occupant -- and to realize the restaurant could use a few more able hands. Yet it's hard to grow too irritated when the bar serves mint juleps in thirst-quenching, water-glass portions. And the staff's easy-going, conversational demeanor hardly clashes with the cozy old cottage where they do their business.

Not everything that comes out of Boucherie's kitchen is a clean success. Zimet has a tendency to oversalt, a common affliction among chefs who spend a lot of time around pig meat and barbecue pits. The last time I ordered the pork cake the meat had been sapped of almost all of its moisture. And broccoli has no business sharing a plate with barbecued ribs this good, even if it's grilled.

It's a shame for easily correctable service problems to overshadow food as good as Zimet's, which most of the time strikes an impressive balance between seasonal delicacy and Southern-style brawn. On the one hand, he uses watermelon to turn down the acidity in a Creole tomato gazpacho, making the most refreshing of soups even more so, and smokes scallops without erasing their sweetness or soft-taffy texture. On the other, he fries like he's been doing it since grade school. Both the boudin balls and fresh-cut french fries rank with the best in town.

The chef's itch to occasionally go over the top -- did I mention the fries are covered in garlic butter and parmesan? -- is fully exposed when it comes to dessert.

Judging by the waitstaff's endorsements, the bacon brownie is Boucherie's signature sweet, never mind that it's actually pretty salty. Imagine a brownie in which nuts are replaced with bits of bacon. Sound good? The bread pudding made with Krispy Kreme donuts is even better. Both are desserts that cast the notion of "sinful" in an entirely new light. They're also both really delicious -- and worth the wait.